I don't think we can really give you any sensible advice without knowing more about your character. One of the difficulties is that African American vernacular is varied, as is the vernacular of white and other Americans.
Let's take Tarantino. Sure, Tarantino has gotten away with making movies full of the "n" word for years or for decades. So have a few other filmmakers to a lesser degree, usually in portrayals of Italian or Irish American gangsters. But based on my experience, I would say that Tarantino has
not gotten away with portraying African Americans speaking like African Americans from the hood speak. He, like most everyone else, if not
everyone else, has not dared to try it. And he likely has no interest in doing so. Instead, he has Samuel Jackson speaking the way
Tarantino speaks, only, as if Tarantino were a black man...a really coool black man.
Actually, and naturally enough, all of Tarantino's characters speak more-or-less like Tarantino himself speaks, only with some subtle nuances to differentiate them. Sort of. Basically, he has his African American characters use the "n" word and the "f" word a lot. In Django, his evil white slave holders use the "n" word a lot, too. Sure, that's authentic enough. But it's a somewhat superficial representation. But, to go deeper, to get more authentic,
would be politically incorrect and probably unsellable and un producible.
PBS recently aired this:
American Experience: Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth
Alice Walker took a lot of shit for
The Color Purple --from African Americans. Forget Tarantino. Alice Walker
really made a virtue of authenticity. And, I may be mistaken, part of that, I take it, or suspect, was giving her characters the authentic African American language she knew them to speak. And she's a Pulitzer Prize winning African American writer. Something to consider, if we're
really committed to authenticity...authencity that's
actually authentic. Or, maybe the hostility was just about the portrayal of abusive behavior.
Anyway, without checking into it myself, I'll bet there are interviews with rappers on YouTube. That might do ya fine for your purposes. Pick up what you need from those. For a film, that might be plenty. I'm not going to tell you that you have to stick to stories about Israelis.
African American speak from the hood isn't all that difficult or mysterious. It mostly involves... Well, I'm not going to tell you. My lips are sealed.
Good luck. I suppose one possibility is that you go ahead and try it. Then, post it here, let folks scrutinize it and help you shape it into something passable, if necessary.
